Reaching for the Moon: The Autobiography of NASA Mathematican Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson spent her life quite literally REACHING FOR THE MOON. She was born in 1918 in a segregated West Virginia, but her parents were determined that Johnson and her brothers and sister would get the education they needed to dream big dreams. For a math prodigy like Johnson, that meant everything. She knew her multiplication tables at 4, started high school at 10, and graduated at 13. She majored in French and math at college and after graduating at 18, became a teacher. Her dream of becoming a mathematician seemed unattainable, as a career in math or science at that time was almost unheard of for a woman, much less an African American woman. Johnson married a fellow teacher and had three daughters. She and her husband taught during the school year and often spent their summers working as a chauffeur and maid. At a wedding in 1952, Johnson heard about NACA, a secret government project looking for African American women who were mathematicians. At NACA, Johnson ran up against racism and sexism (no surprise to her), but it wasn't long before white engineers were asking to work with the African American woman with amazing math skills. When NACA became NASA, Johnson computed the trajectory for the flight of Alan Shephard, America's first man in space. John Glenn didn't trust the computer calculations for his flight and demanded they get Johnson to calculate the numbers by hand. He wasn't going into space unless her numbers matched the computer. At the end of her career at NASA, Johnson actually did reach for the moon, working on the Apollo 11 mission. In the epilogue, she writes about her life after NASA (the agency's Katherine G. Johnson Computational Research Facility is named in her honor) and gives readers her take on the authenticity of the storyline in the movie Hidden Figures: "about 75% accurate."